Ewan's Cycling Blog

The Köln hotel was not much to write home about although it did have a giant electrically operated bottle of Nutella™ which made Dr T quite happy. Every home should have (a) a kettle, (b) a rice cooker and (c) an electrically operated Nutella™ dispenser. This is what you want to see when you’re facing a long cycle. Very strangely for a downmarket hotel (but with a cathedral “view”) they also had a robot waiter/waitress. It didn’t seem to do very much except trundle around waiting for people to put stuff on the trays at the side. This seemed, to me at least, one of the least impressive uses of robotics and AI. For what it’s worth, this fake internal monologue of the Tesla robot made me laugh and laugh. Köln continued its down-at-heel vibe as I retrieved the bikes. I nervously scuttled through underpasses rich in feces, urine and the sad broken people who ...

Filled to the very brim by five star dinner the previous evening and five star breakfast — they had an eggstation! — we were ready in the early morning to tackle what should have been a relatively easy day. Follow the Rhine from Koblenz up to Köln and enjoy the lovely scenery… An easy ask. Before leaving our lovely hotel, we had to have our own tribute to the enduring greatness of the BMW Z8 which a huge number of middle-aged overtanned couples wearing inappropriately tight white jeans had gathered in Koblenz to celebrate. I was obviously obsessed about this. What do they talk about? “ Ah, Hans, my car produces 395hp and has a top speed of 250 km/h ”. “ No way Ludwig! My car also produces 395hp and has a top speed of 250 km/h. What a coincidence! ” Two cyclists and a selection of the hundreds of Z8s in the car park. I think, like gravel factories, it’s time to move on from the Z8 owner’s club. Because we were in an entirely different part...

We ate classic cyclist food last night: burgers and chips in a cool and quite hip place. The bottle of excellent Riesling went down well too. The hotel room was wonderful although we both slept badly. I had recurring nightmares of steering my bike into the Rhine…which is something to avoid when following EV15. There was a superb breakfast (well done the Brunfels hotel) and then we were off negotiating the usual omnishamblolic exit from a city. The route is never quite right, there are always tram tracks waiting to grab your front wheel and every 50m or so you have to stop and check which way you’re supposed to be going. It would be churlish to leave Mainz without a photo of the statue of its greatest son. There’s some pretty exciting thigh and crotch action going on here. Who knew? Mainz does have very cute traffic lights. They’re reminiscent of the ones that I saw in the former DDR which have a little man with a hat on. Is this...

It was a beautiful morning as we left our hotel in Speyer. To be honest, it wasn’t a great hotel — very much at the bottom end of the four star range. It was deadly quiet last night but when we got down for breakfast at 6:45 it was absolutely jumping. A hundred people stuffing huge quantities of four-star-kit-breakfast into their face-holes. I wasn’t entirely sure what was going on but it turned out there was a big convention of pyramid marketing scheme wellness nutters. My glowering misanthropy worked its magic as a nutter-deflection-shield but unfortunately Dr T — who is a nicer person than me in uncountable ways — was cornered over coffee by an swivel-eyed middle-aged wellness nutter woman who was well on her way to adding Dr T to her WhatsApp group which could balance the chakras of our bicycles and supply wellness balanced nutritional “supplements” for only a small down payment of €100 or something. I hate wellness nutters. Eventually, Dr T charmingly p...